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On October 5, 2025, this website is going to begin counting down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
First, we’re lining up all the puzzle pieces needed to get to that date.
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During the decades when motion pictures emerged out of mechanics and chemistry, equally profound strides were made in the mastery of a fundamental force of nature: electricity. 

Given the indispensable role that electricity plays in modern life, it’s worth remembering: humans of some kind have roamed the Earth for hundreds of millennia, but have only mastered electromagnetism over the past two hundred years. 

We won’t go into the earliest discoveries by the likes of Franklin, Volta, Ørsted, or Faraday – who brought basic understanding to the threshold of mastery in the late 18^th an early 19^th centuries.^⁠1  We will start instead with first use of electricity for communication: the telegraph.  

Words on Wires

Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1791, Samuel Morse didn’t start out to be a world-changing inventor.  

He studied art at Yale, and enjoyed a successful career painting portraits of such luminaries as the Marquis de Lafayette. He spent several years in Europe studying the Old Masters. During one such trip in the 1830s, he first heard how electrical impulses could travel along a wire.

On his return voyage from Europe in 1832, Morse sketched out an idea for using a single wire and an electromagnet to transmit coded signals. Back in the United States, he teamed up with the American inventor Alfred Vail, who refined the mechanics and the code, and with physicist Joseph Henry, who had already demonstrated how electromagnets could be used in relays. Together they turned Morse’s initial concept into a working system.

Morse conducted early experiments in the late 1830s, but the historic breakthrough came in 1844.  From a terminal in Washington, D.C he tapped out  “What hath God wrought” over an experimental line the government had strung to another terminal in Baltimore – proving that intelligence could be transmitted over wires. 

What God had wrought, the ensuing century would reveal, was global communication at the speed of light.

Sound on Wires – 1876

Samuel Morse had proven in 1844 that coded words could travel over wires. It took another three decades before the same could be said of words spoken by the human voice. 

Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born educator who worked with the deaf.  He spent hours studying how vibrations of the larynx and inner ear could be translated into physical sensations that his deaf students could detect by touch or sight.  His lifelong fascination with the mechanics of sound convinced him it could be shaped and reproduced by instruments. That belief drew him to telegraphy, the dominant electrical medium of his time, and to the radical idea that speech itself might be carried over wires.

One of the technical challenges of the 1870s was finding a way to send several coded signals down the same wire without interference – an idea known as “harmonic” or multi-message telegraphy. Bell approached the problem as a student of acoustics, reasoning that if each signal were assigned its own musical pitch (what we now call ‘frequency’), the tones might coexist on a wire just as the human ear can distinguish multiple instruments or voices singing  in harmony. Pursuing that line of thought, he was soon captivated by a more daring proposition: if separate tones could travel together, why not the full range of the human voice?

Beginning in 1875, Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson built a series of crude transmitters and receivers – membranes stretched over magnets and coils – to convert the vibrations of speech into an electrical current. Most of these trials produced little more than garbled noise and static, but they kept building new experiments. 

That persistence paid off on March 10, 1876. Working out of a makeshift laboratory in Boston, Bell accidentally spilled battery acid on his clothes and called out, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” In the next room, an astonished Watson heard the words clearly – not through the wall but through the wires. For the first time in history, the human voice had traveled electrically from one place to another.

Bell’s success marked the leap from “words on wires” to “voices on wires.” There was still one more giant leap in electrical communications to come.^⁠2  

Pictures on Wires  – 1873 – 1876 

With the telegraph, mankind learned that information in the form of dots and dashes could be transmitted over wires. With the telephone, the same could be said for the human voice itself. But what about images?  Could light also be transformed into an electrical signal? 

That question got its first hint of an answer in 1840s. 

Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker and inventor, is often credited as the first to conceive a form of image transmission. Drawing from his expertise with electric clocks and telegraphy, he patented an “Electric Printing Telegraph” in 1843 and later proposed using synchronized pendulums and selenium cells to scan images line by line and transmit them over wires. Though entirely impractical with the materials of his time, Bain’s idea introduced the essential principle of breaking an image into sequential elements—a foundation for later developments in facsimile transmission and ultimately, video.

Meanwhile, in the decades after wires carried Morse’s question about God’s intentions, telegraphy became the nervous system of the world, with wires spanning continents and shrinking the time it took for news to travel between cities from days to minutes.  In 1850, the first telegraph cable was laid on the floor of the English Channel, connecting the United Kingdom to the Continent, and by 1858 the first transatlantic cable linked Europe and North America.^⁠3

Willoughby Smith, an English electrical engineer began his career at the Gutta Percha Company in London, where he worked on laying submarine telegraph cables.  In 1873, Smith made an surprising discovery while testing compounds for insulating the company’s cables. 

One of the materials he experimented with was the element selenium, a chemical cousin to sulfur, that was cheap, easily fabricated, and resistant to moisture.^⁠4 In the course of his tests, Smith noticed that the resistance of selenium was not constant.  It changed when the material was exposed to light. In darkness, it behaved like an insulator, but under illumination, its conductivity increased. Smith did not immediately grasp the broader implications, but this was the first clear observation that light could directly alter the flow of electricity in a solid substance. That observation implied possibilities that would take another half-century to fully manifest.  

Experiments with the relationship between light and electricity accelerated after Willoughby Smith’s seminal discovery.   

In 1876, the scene shifts to Germany, where Werner von Siemens presented a paper to the Berlin Academy of Sciences entitled On the Use of Selenium for Measuring Light Intensity and for Copying Images at a Distance.  In the first recorded dissertation on the subject, von Siemens not only validated Willoughby Smith’s, discovery, but proposed for the first time a practical way that images could be transmitted electrically. 

Siemens proposed using a selenium cell – slender rods or thin plates of selenium fitted with metallic contacts – to produce an electric current from light.^⁠5 

Siemens went from theory to application when he built the first working photocells that demonstrated the conversion of light into electricity. Though he never attempted to transmit an actual image of any sort, his proposal and subsequent experiments supplied an important milestone in the quest to turn light – and images – into an electrical current.  Such cells, Siemens fancied might one day act as “artificial eyes.” 

Siemens’ idea came to its first fruition in 1881, when London physicist Shelford Bidwell demonstrated what he called “telephotography” – the first practical use of selenium cells to send crude facsimile images over wires.^⁠6 Bidwell built a crude scanner that projected light through a moving slit onto a selenium cell; as the brightness varied, so did the cell’s resistance, producing a fluctuating electrical current that was recreated in a receiver. Bidwell certainly did not know it at the time, but he had introduced the essential principle that would govern television research until 1927. 

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¹ For the uninitiated: Benjamin Franklin (1752) showed that lightning is electrical in nature; Alessandro Volta (1800) built the first true battery, proving that electricity could be generated chemically; Hans Christian Ørsted (1820) discovered that electric current produces a magnetic field; and Michael Faraday (1831) discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind electric generators and transformers.

² Bell’s triumph was quickly contested by Elisha Gray, who applied a rival patent for a strikingly similar device on the very same day—February 14, 1876. Years of litigation followed, but Bell ultimately prevailed. Had the courts decided otherwise, the modern world might well speak of the “Gray Telephone Company” instead of Bell.

³ The first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in August 1858 but failed after only a few weeks. Reliable transatlantic communication was not achieved until a more durable cable was laid in July 1866.

⁴ Selenium is a gray, non-metallic element (atomic number 34) first discovered in 1817.

⁵ Werner von Siemens was already a major industrial figure in 1876.  Founded in Berlin 1847, his firm, Siemens & Halske, , grew into one of Germany’s largest electrical and industrial companies. So  when Siemens put his name behind selenium research, it gave legitimacy to what might otherwise have been seen as an obscure curiosity.

⁶ Two years later, in 1883. New York inventor Charles Fritts coated a thin layer of gold over a plate of selenium.  Fritts intent was not image transmission rather than power generation, but he proved that sunlight could produce current directly. His invention was the first solar cell – the first step in the modern science of photovoltaics.